Nin Win

Yes you can paint over the varnish. I'd give it a bit of extra time to fully cure so that all the solvents and propellant in the can will fully disperse, but the only issue will be if the varnish is slippery. I don't know if munitorum spray is the gloss or the matte, but the gloss can be tricky to paint over.

So the cursed weapon ability actually hits super hard. When the models are engaged and you get to spend two actions attacking, plus 1 damage on a strength 5 weapon is really good.

I think for AoS they're both fine. For me the deal breaker is the colour choices on the stormvault side of the printed board. I'm pretty sensitive to clashing colours and their bone and blue-grey means it doesn't quite work with the drab red I painted my other terrain in. So I'd either have to paint up the stormvault terrain in a totally different scheme or have it not really look right on the stormvault board. In the end I decided to wait and see what terrain kits they come out with in the future.

I was running necromancer, 3 grave guard 9 skeletons. Opponent was running the Iron Golems starter with the prefector hammer guy and the basic guy with the flail instead of two hammers.

I've played against them with legions of nagash. They were both faster and stronger/more elite than me, but I had numbers. It ended up being very close but me returning fighters closer to the action with the necromancer was the only thing that gave me a win. The prefector can't survive outnumbered. He can dish a lot of damage out with that hammer, but he can't hold the line on his own. My opponent basically tried to hold a choke point with just him at one point and he got dragged down in two activation. The legionaires with shields would have been a better choice to double move there. Having played games where the twist messes with toughness or strength, I think the Signifier might actually be very powerful. It's certainly possible that lots of warbands already have a preponderence of S3 so it seems like going up one higher toughness isn't good against their attacks (as it changes nothing, they still need 5+) but it seems to me that the fighters within the warbands that have a lot of S3 who also have good damage output are not S3. They're the special fighters that are not just basic grunts. So the Signifier might not do much to help your fighters deal with skeletons with swords, but it's the grave guard with the S4 and S5 halberds and the cursed blade abilities that you really want to have hit equal or lower strength. They do a ton of damage. Similarly a grot might not be impacted by the ability, but those nasty squigs certainly are. Throwing bolas is actually pretty good. There have been loads of times in the games I've played where I get my guys knocked down to 1 or 2 health left. A ranged attack that doesn't take an activation is actually really good. Especially when you know it can take out a fighter. It's also good though to just send out some attrition on undamaged targets early on.

So I'm only like 5 games in with Legions of Nagash and I've noticed something. Triples are really reliable. Doubles happen a lot in the 6 dice and you'll always have a wild die so you can very often have a triple when you want it. Legions of Nagash is pretty slow. One of the fastest ways to have a fighter be where you want is to summon it closer after it has died. I've had a couple games where the objectives ended up being a substantial distance from many of my fighters. At first I was wary about double moving skeletons and grave guard into vulnerable positions on turn 1 or 2, but now I see that I want one or two to die. Just so I can redploy them with my necromancer as he heads towards actually doing something important. I had a game yesterday where I had to end a move action within 1" of a certain board edge and remove the fighter. The only reason I won was three of my fighters from the other side of the board were taken out in turn 1 and 2. I was able to revive them on turns 2, 3 & 4. I ended up winning 6-4 because of that. TLDR: Summon Undead to score objectives. It's often faster than walking there. Losing a skeleton or two turn 1 can be a good thing.

I've always been tempted by the sorceress on black dragon and the corsairs, but the uncertainty about aelves always stopped my purchase. Depending on if there are warscroll changes and how allegiance abilities go perhaps I will end up getting some. I already have about 2500 points of Stormcast so Im sure I can make something work.

I think you might have faced a spike in the dice or some perfect storm of terrain and models arranged in dagger-shield-hammer that lead to that. If you do the math (including extra damage from shots and whatnot from abilities) they simply on average shouldn't be putting out the damage like that. EDIT: Oh, looks like the rapid fire crossbow guys can spike up that high pretty regularly. 2 attacks of 3 dice each will produce 1 crit most shots so that's 6 damage right there. Taking 4 of those plus a hunter leader would indeed make for a nasty gun line. One thing I noticed locally though is that people are already ignoring the rules and just doing "deploy everything on your back line of the table and we'll just kill eachother" type games. Whereas when you use the cards, the force gets split into 3 forces and you can start so much more closely to one another.

I guess it depends on what the cost ends up being. If it ends up being that you use 10 miniatures and set the other two aside and maybe use them or maybe not but it's still a good deal, then it's worth it. I don't think Fireforge's initial offerings were aimed at warhammer players at all. They were historical plastics and all they did in terms of promotion was in historical miniaturesmagazines, sites, and on primarily historical podcasts and youtube channels. They even have their own rules set Deus Vult which has no fantasy in it at all. I think their fantasy stuff is a later change of direction. I hope they keep at it though as I like the style of their new miniatures. There's no way I'm going to get GW zombies, so they're definitely a contender for me.

Looks like you're right about that. Chosen Champion looks so close to the leader that in the lower res image it's hard to tell them apart, but they are different. So I'm sad I won't be able to use them as leaders, but happy that I can now include them alongside the necromancer. Those are actually different runemarks apparently. That's good news, I guess.

"You can re-roll save rolls for attacks that target this unit if this unit has not made a normal move in the same turn." So you'd get this on your opponent's turn every time. Interesting. I'm snagging a second Iron Golems warband from a local guy so I can have extra ogor and dorf for Warcry but I think 20 wounds with a rerollable 4+ for 140 points might be a good objective/line holder for my beasts of chaos as allies.

EDIT: I was wrong about this. Turns out the three different 8 pointed stars are slightly different and the one on the seneschal is the Chosen Champion and not the leader one. --> At first I was disappointed I couldn't have a skeleton champion or a seneschal in the same warband as a necromancer but then it dawned on me that only the siphon ability is necromancer only. So I'll definitely have the two other leaders on the roster. <-- see? wrong. A bit of tactics when it comes to out numbering your opponent: tempo matters. The game plays fast and is often concluded in three or four turns. So if you use and ability to get extra movement and get a good number of your guys to engage their more expensive ones turn 1 you're going to feel great. But then they're going to hit you. And if you engaged people who haven't activated yet, they're going to hit you twice. And this assumes that it all works out in terms of having enough models in the dagger, shield and hammer and having them be in the right places to tie up what you need to. Might I suggest instead that you look at the scenario and bypass objectives and set up layers of guys beyond the objectives but not engaging the enemy? So they not only are forced into wading through your numbers, but they have to spend the activations/abilities to move in rather than you giving them an extra attack? And for the scenarios when you need to attack superior enemy fighters, you'll need to make sure you use your weight of numbers to actually get more attacks in. Tying them up with models won't do much if they already have the objectives they need or are walking away with the treasure. People are acting like swarms are just going to dominate the game, but I think that will only be true if you are really, really thoughtful about how to use them. I think people are going to use their elite models to just crush swarms late turn 1 and early turn 2 and force the swarm player to play the last half of turn 2 and all of turn 3 with their numbers advantage largely gone and at a significant fighter quality disadvantage.

Fireforge Games has some hard plastic fantasy scaled humans about to release for their Forgotten World (lol) game. They're scheduled for retail release any week now. https://fireforge-games.com/forgotten-world-46 While they aren't GW, I think they fit a more heroic aesthetic just fine. I've also been using a lot of reaper bones miniatures for various heroes and undead characters. It's a pain to cut off the mould lines in the softer material, but the price was right. And they're definitely the same early 2000s heroic fantasy aesthetic that warhammer is.

Sadly for my horde the cheapest skeleton is 55 points. That 15 points might not seem like much but when you take 10 such fighters, you're now missing a 150 point medium strength bruiser from the list. My prediction for tying up good models with cheap ones is that you'll think it's going great into late turn 1, early turn 2 but then you'll suddenly lose a ton of bad models and go into late turn 2, early turn 3 with no longer having a numbers advantage and now having a major quality disadvantage. I think the real way to use numbers will be in layers set up past objectives. Where the elite warband has to be one the one to attack and fight through them. I think when the scenario/situation has the horde as the aggressor, the lower quality warband is going to have to go for an outnumbering to kill rather than a tying up.

The math looks like actions aren't as important as damage per turn across the entire warband. So you've got a bunch of actions? That's nice. You very likely don't have the same actual damage output as a mixed group with access to sources of damage from abilities which don't require actions. Furthermore, the splitting of forces into groups could well end up with a small group of chaff/basic grunts having to face off against some truly excellent fighters and being defeated in detail before their reinforcements arrive on later turns. So it's not just average damage per action/activation/warband but also the damage output of each of the dagger, shield and hammer. I'm expecting my skeleton heavy Legions of Nagash warband to really struggle against my friend's Iron Jaws.